This is my first blog post and hopefully not my last. I've decided to share some thoughts I have that have to do with preparedness and whatever else my ADD mind can come up with. Today I wanted to talk about the ant and grasshopper. The story goes like this: in a field one summer's day a Grasshopper was hopping about, chirping and singing to its heart's content. An Ant passed by, bearing along with great toil an ear of corn he was taking to the nest.
"Why not come and chat with me," said the Grasshopper, "instead of toiling and moiling in that way?"
"I am helping to lay up food for the winter," said the Ant, "and recommend you to do the same."
"Why bother about winter?" said the Grasshopper; "We have got plenty of food at present." But the Ant went on its way and continued its toil.
When the winter came the Grasshopper had no food and found itself dying of hunger - while it saw the ants distributing every day corn and grain from the stores they had collected in the summer. Then the Grasshopper knew: It is best to prepare for days of need.
The way I see it, most people are grasshoppers. It's taken me a while to realize that we all need to be ants.
I had an opportunity this past week to harvest some grapes from a farm nearby. As I was picking grapes I was thanking God for the opportunity and for the abundance of FREE FOOD! I could hear cars driving by and I wondered if they ever thought about storing up food. I will have to say that's it's much easier to drive to the store and buy grapes, but there will come a time when we may not have that luxury. My advice is to start now being that ant. When the time comes, you don't want start learning then.
So after about 1.5 hours I had 10gal of sweet muscadine grapes. That's a lof of grapes and they won't last very long before they spoil. My plan was to steam juice the grapes to extract as much juice as possible and then run the skins and left over pulp through a Squeezo strainer to make jelly and jam. The juice was put in quart jars and then water bathed for 15 min. With two trips to the vines I had a total of 25 gal of grapes. It took me all day Saturday to process everything and we ended up with 34 quarts of 100% juice and 1 five gal bucket of skins that still need to be processed. The juice won't have to be frozen or refridgerated. It can sit in the pantry for years. Now that it's preserved we can take our time making wine, jelly and jams.
It's now 9 pm and we have processed all the grape skins. We ended up with about 4 gal of goop. We used a vintage Squeezo that I found on Craigslist. Using the squeezo made quick work of all those skins. So we get home and Donna has a great idea. She had the idea of using the pulp to make fruit leather! Duh! Of course. So we got out the dehydrator and filled her up. Soon we will fill our pantry with wine, jelly, jam and fruit roll ups. Sure it's a lot of work but it gives you such a sense of accomplishment. Once I get the hang of this blogging stuff I'll post more info and links to what I'm talking about.
